Topix.net
Topix was started in 2002 by some of the people involved in the DMOZ Open Directory Project. It consists of an AI editor that categorizes breaking news, by what criteria I am not sure. They claim to have a massive data-store.The emphasis on Geo-tagging is nice. The section that searches blogs is nice as well. On the downside, their forums on the sidebar are way to prominent for the crap that is filling them, eg. “Is it OK for Women to Fart Out Loud?”, and “Should homosexuality be illegal?”
The design and readability are very good.
Newsvine.com
Newsvine is the nicest designed site of them all, and definitely had much Web 2.0 buzz surrounding its launch in 2006.
Newsvine is Digg-like in it’s efforts to build community and give people tools to create content. Stories are voted up and down to gain front-page prominence. It has a mix of user written news and stories from the Associated Press. They boast that they make it easy to “seed” articles, ie. submit breaking stories onto the vine.
A nice feature is Newsvine Live where you see all the activity being processed by the application, similair to tailing a log file.I’m not decided yet if Newsvine is more hype than a solid news source.
Newstrust.net
Finally, launched as well in 2006, Newstrust is the most straight-up, unadorned news source, and my favorite. A simple three column layout, with everything of concern in the middle column makes for an uncomplicated grazing.
Can we conclude that news is best served undesigned? I want to believe news can be beautiful and usable at once. More likely is that the correct forms for online news hasn’t fully evolved yet. After all, in comparison to the time period has had to discover its optimal forms, online news is still in its infancy.
Newstrust is the only non-profit of the crew – its stated mission being the rating of news articles from the online media universe on one principle – journalistic integrity. It’s content comes from any media outlet from The Washington Post, to Vanity Fair, to independent blogs. I imagine there is no copyright issue because all the stories link to their url of origin.
Tags: article, comparison, news
